January 23, 2018

Elsewhere (261)

In the interview, Newman relies on this technique [of perverse rephrasing] to a remarkable extent, making it a useful illustration of a much broader pernicious trend. Peterson was not evasive or unwilling to be clear about his meaning. And Newman’s exaggerated restatements of his views mostly led viewers astray, not closer to the truth… One of the most important things this interview illustrates — one reason it is worth noting at length — is how Newman repeatedly poses as if she is holding a controversialist accountable, when in fact, for the duration of the interview, it is she that is “stirring things up” and “whipping people into a state of anger.”

It is interesting that the scholars feel able to announce in advance, on behalf of their own students, and the students of other history tutors at Oxford, a decision on whether students will engage with the [Ethics and Empire] project. One might think that the ability to “think critically” would include openness to ideas from heterodox perspectives, as well as the capacity to decide for oneself, independently of one’s tutors, whether a source of information is worthy of consideration. One has to remember, however, that the word “critical” may have a special technical meaning in the context of the humanities.

Those who mourn the demise of Aboriginal culture almost always regard things from the viewpoint of the men, who were indeed dispossessed of their land, and subsequently their traditions and status. Land wasn’t the only item of property they lost, however. They also lost or traded their women to the settlers, and this absorption – along with frontier warfare and disease – rapidly eroded tribal structures and doomed Aboriginal traditions to obsolescence. The settlers arrived with a wealth of goods and a shortage of females, and they were generally less enthusiastic about beating women than was customary in Aboriginal culture… The men lost a lot in the invasion, while the women had little to lose and plenty to gain.

Do you have any doubt about the left’s hatred for those who will not stay in their assigned status? Have you noticed their quickness to turn on their own allies? Fail to follow the latest fad, and your status is demoted. Perhaps you’ve noticed that endlessly callous virtue signalling is the identifying badge of our modern try-hard Striver Class. Maybe that’s because American public education is now a 20-year Milgram Experiment, where the meta-message inside political correctness is to override your own judgement, in favour of deliberately-shifting judgements from people with higher status. These aren’t accidents. They’re clues.

Tassano's observations combined with Katzman's thoughts on Leftism as a "positional good," where value comes from scarcity explain the lunacy displayed at "Real Peer Review" often discussed on these pages, not to mention the SJW tendency to mine ever deeper into what constitutes the "problematic" in otherwise rather prosaic human interaction.

tendency to mine ever deeper into what constitutes the “problematic” in otherwise rather prosaic human interaction.

The theatrical agonising – over everything from barbecues to cupcakes to spellcheck software – is very competitive and presumably exhausting. Perhaps that explains the chronic sourness of those who indulge in it.

If your views are untethered, and a response to an outward community within which you have to signal your correctness and pieties, it must be a constant strain, looking around to see where the next pitfall is, checking you get the thumbs up and haven't strayed.

In the JP/CN interview you can see that CN is mouthing the pieties regardless of what JP says - she is playing the role for her community - whereas JP's views have been thought through and he is vastly more tethered as a result. I think that's why, when someone is red-pilled, it's usually on one specific truth, but that then leads to another, and another, and the house of cards collapses. Whereas if, for example, it was somehow proved that yes, actually the majority reason for women not being in the FTSE top 100 was a secret patriarchal cabal who deliberately excluded women, JP could update his facts, accept it, condemn it, adjust his other beliefs to accommodate, and move on.

This constant adjustment of the mental gyroscope in reaction to the need for ever more exclusive positional goods must hurt at some level. Not just the constant strain, also the bafflement you must feel if you've always played the game, e.g. as a good feminist, suddenly to find you're a Nazi because of your views on trans. We're back to the Communist flip in WW2, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.

We meet at 7:30 PM on the third Wednesday of every month in the Fellowship Hall of St. Luke's Lutheran Church, Benkelman, Nebraska. BYOB. Set-ups provided. (The Patriarchy Ladies' Auxiliary usually provides a pot-luck supper, unless their quilting interferes.)

The theatrical agonising – over everything from barbecues to cupcakes to spellcheck software – is very competitive and presumably exhausting. Perhaps that explains the chronic sourness of those who indulge in it.

"You're not reading that incorrectly: If someone posts a sign advertising a women's group and colors it pink, then Williams College wants you to report that to the school's anti-bias squad, which will then take all appropriate action."

Newman repeatedly poses as if she is holding a controversialist accountable, when in fact, for the duration of the interview, it is she that is “stirring things up” and “whipping people into a state of anger.”

Spot-on. And of course, as we've heard, she's still at it.

I noticed that Friedersdorf's tweet publicizing it calls this “twisting [of] words to make people look like extremist monsters” “a new trend in public discourse”. Oh no, it's not new. Not by a long chalk. Remember Enoch Powell? Or Barry Goldwater? (And if you think either actually was an extremist monster, that just shows how powerful the technique used to be.) It's just that in the internet age, people watching these interviews aren't sitting at home asking themselves, “Is it just me... ?” They're asking other people all over the world and realising that it absolutely isn't.

“they were generally less enthusiastic about beating women than was customary in Aboriginal culture”

Tassano's observations combined with Katzman's thoughts on Leftism as a "positional good," where value comes from scarcity...

I've not heard of this Katzman - is his position similar to Kristian Niemietz's, which I've linked to here before? It'd be interesting to see if this is something economists have cmmented upon independently.

The theatrical agonising is very competitive and presumably exhausting.

At least in Versailles, the pecking order was well established, and fashions changed at a pace where one had at least a prayer of keeping up. Life in the Clown Quarter today is Versailles at high speed, with each of the inmates vying for their turn at playing Louis XIV and forcing the newest fad on all the courtiers.

I think intersectional should be rebranded as fractious, factional, splintered, or exclusionary. I wouldn't care about these people except they get space in the media to spread their nonsense and there is an excess of so called academics who get paid a lot more than I do to produce nothing but harm.

I know someone doing a phd in anthropology who is a fairly conservative white heterosexual male who was a very successful businessman. The very picture of patriarchy. I'd pay to see him defend his thesis against the department. He said he loves the subject, just wishes it was part of a different department.

My impression was that Cathy Newman was following the classic progressive technique of creating prepackaged arguments that "destroy" right wing nuts but she didn't bother to try the arguments out on anyone who didn't already agree with her. I regularly see these "if someone says x then destroy them by saying y!" on Facebook. They often involve question begging.

The men lost a lot in the invasion, while the women had little to lose and plenty to gain.

Many years ago, when I had more time to browse libraries, I ran across an anthropologist's account of his sojourn with an Amazonian tribe. Rape of unmarried girls was common and accepted. He described the despair on the face of a young girl as she was dragged off into the bushes.

Was that Napoleon Chagnon? Whether he was telling the unvarnished truth or exaggerating (or much worse), his work has been thoroughly denounced as rayciss lying lies by the social justice wing of academic anthropology.

In 2000, the simmering criticisms erupted in public with the release of “Darkness in El Dorado,” by the journalist Patrick Tierney. A true-life jungle horror story redolent with allusions to Conrad, the book charged Chagnon with grave misdeeds: not just fomenting violence but also fabricating data, staging documentary films and, most sensational, participating in a biomedical expedition that may have caused or worsened a measles epidemic that resulted in hundreds of Yanomami deaths. Advance word of the book was enough to plunge anthropology into a global public-relations crisis — a typical headline: “Scientist ‘Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory.’ ” But even today, after thousands of pages of discussion, including a lengthy investigation by the American Anthropological Association (A.A.A.), there is no consensus about what, if anything, Chagnon did wrong.

Here in the Dominion of Canada, we had much mau-mauing over the need for an inquiry into why so many indigenous women go missing or end up dead (statistically, they don't any more than white women in the same areas; it's a regional poverty issue).

The inquiry quietly wound down last year when it became impossible to massage the numbers to hide that the reason so many indigenous women go missing or are murdered is indigenous men.

According to this article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Systems Leaders "build relationships based on deep listening, and networks of trust and collaboration start to flourish.

"They are so convinced that something can be done that they do not wait for a fully developed plan, thereby freeing others to step ahead and learn by doing". In the real world that's also called "winging it".

Have you noticed their quickness to turn on their own allies? Fail to follow the latest fad, and your status is demoted.

By way of a timely illustration, pop artiste Taylor Swift has apparently gone from feminist-approved empowered ladyperson to enemy of the revolution. It seems she failed to attend the so-called Women’s March, which is apparently mandatory, and only tweeted her “respect” for those who did. (Quite why one should respect a dumb, narcissistic clown-show of people waving demented placards and mouthing conspiracy theories, and leaving the usual mountain of garbage for someone else to clean up, is another matter.)

I believe the last time this happened was last year, when Ms Swift publicly encouraged her fans to vote, but didn’t specify a candidate. This terrible sin was compounded by her comment: “I don’t think that I know enough yet in life to be telling people who to vote for.”

Professor Bret Weinstein of Evergreen College fame, attended a speech by constitutional lawyer Adam Levine at his old school on the subject of free speech - or rather how to legally prevent free speech. He wasn't impressed:

Deep down, you think that liberty is won once and for all, and this is why you can afford the luxury of disdaining it. You are engaged in a formidable battle, and you behave as though it were a ping pong match.

What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death. Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives. Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown. The value system was the exact opposite. You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives. There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system. They fail.

We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa. The kleptocracy extends through the whole society. My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies. The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store. If you were sick and didn't have money, drop dead. That was normal.

So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't bathing him, I wasn't surprised. It was familiar.

In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom. Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp. After paying the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed or thrown out. That was normal.

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic. One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working – collapsed to the ground. They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking. She lay there in the dirt. Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's not. It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.

A friend witnessed that in the Middle East: Arab men lounging around while women labored all day at home and in the fields...and were often supervised by little boys whose only function was to watch them and make sure they did not slack off.

In Before the Dawn Nicholas Wade writes a fair bit about the amount of covering-up that goes on in the fields of anthropology and archeology.

One interesting story of a researcher who did not do this goes thus: The man was studying African Bushmen, who never seem able to gather in significant numbers unless some non-Bushman tribe is present to enforce their own rules on behavior. Out of the blue the researcher got it into his head to ask the about half a dozen Bushman males he was sitting with whether any of them had ever killed a man. Nearly all of them responded that they had. Taken aback by this he asked them why they had killed others.

"The renewed efforts of the Niger State police command to rid the state of criminal elements may have started yielding results, following the discovery of a severed head of a few months old baby girl in a polythene [bag]in possession of a young man suspected to be one of the arrow-heads of a syndicate that specialises in using human parts for ritual purposes in parts of the state."

I had been assured by reliable bien pensants that pagans did not do that sort of thing, and that those who said they did were slanderous slandering slanderers.

I hope that at some point Jane Goodall got a set for her birthday; long ago she did an interview where she said something to the effect that as a child she pretended to be Mrs. Tarzan and lived in the jungle talking to all the animals “ but the blighter married the wrong Jane,” or words to that effect.

30325 - mostly due to doing the quick crossword I’m guessing. I’m a school dropout so it ain’t education that got me there. Could Monty be our mosted wordy learned contributor?

I keep wondering why people try to spread western values to the Middle East and Africa. It’s pretty obvious they don’t want them. And the ones that do try their best to emigrate I imagine. That’s the only place I take exception with the linked article. Surely some immigrants are keen to adopt western society and get out of the place they’re in. The trick is knowing which ones. There was a recent blowup down here about ‘african’ street gangs which the usual suspects tried to drown with cries of racism. But there are other anecdotes agreeing with the article about immigrants opening shops in regional areas and generally fitting in and coming up in the benefit column.

30,325, but some of them have more than one "right" answer depending on colloquial usage, e.g., "deal" - either "sale" as in "I got a great deal", or "plea" as in copping a plea via a deal with the DA.

"People often take public positions in an attempt to increase their social status.

If you’ve been in a corporate setting, or settings with certain friends, I don’t need to offer further examples of this idea. You’ve seen it happen, and you also know that you need to be “reading the room” at all times before you speak and act. Failure costs status. People notice this dynamic, and act accordingly."

[...]

"Do you really think it’s a coincidence that leftism and its “Diversity Pokemon Points” amount to a full caste system?

Do you have any doubt about The left’s hatred for those who will not stay in their assigned status?

Have you noticed their quickness to turn on their own allies? Fail to follow the latest fad, and your status is demoted.

Maybe that’s because American public education is now a 20-year Milgram Experiment. Where the meta-message inside political correctness is to override your own judgement, in favor of deliberately-shifting judgements from people with higher status.

These aren’t accidents. They’re clues.

Leftism isn’t a policy machine or an economic machine. Its economic results would tell you that much in a hurry. But the machine keeps running. Which means it must work for something. The correct question is: in what way does it work?"

Karen Straughan has some thoughts on the Jordan Peterson / Cathy Newman interview.

The more you poke and parse, the more it becomes obvious just how dumb and obtuse, how non-reciprocal, and how wilfully dogmatic, Ms Newman’s position is. And by extension, the positions of those who agree with her.

Newman: Let me get this straight. You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters?

It was absolutely vital here that Peterson broke his 'relaxed' posture and did a tactical facepalm. It would have gone even more viral than the interview subsequently did. It would be the meme of the century; it would still be played fifty years hence.

In the JP/CN interview you can see that CN is mouthing the pieties regardless of what JP says - she is playing the role for her community

Personally I think she is a bit dim, has a completely closed mind and was lazily going for a "GOTCHA!" moment which could then be edited and gone viral. Alas, the tables were reversed and Peterson "got her" instead. She is now doomed to spend the rest of her life as a meme.

I haven't watched the whole interview. What I had seen was fairly atrocious, but reading that transcript...incredible. You could have got an AI program to simply say "So what you are saying is" and then repeat a number of pre-prepared statements aimed at misrepresenting him.

Presumably she is paid a large sum of money for this. Ironic given that she was complaining about the "gender gap" in pay. She sounds vastly overpaid on that example.

The interview inquisition suggests that the most useful background to have when dealing with SJW's/"journalists" is training in clinical psychology and experience in treating mental and emotional disorders.

Or you could simply apply Occam's Razor and conclude that Newman is just dishonest.

Indeed, which is why I asked for another source: It fits my impressions of what is happening in Sweden, but therefore I distrust my impulse to believe, and Russians do sometimes spread disinformation for their own purposes,

I went back and reread all those old links. For the life of me, I cannot wrap my mind around the fact that some parents would willingly, without a second thought, disadvantage their own children in some misbegotten effort to attain status among their fellows. It's one thing to observe what occurs in inner city slums or the "hollers'" of deepest Appalachia and feel sympathy for people who don't know better. It's another to see people willingly kneecapping their own children for one of those "positional goods" we've discussed. One wonders where Dante would have stuck such parents in his Circles of Hell, if he were writing today.

“Participants will be challenged to apply principles and practices of justice to their own work, interrogating questions such as: Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who is most vulnerable? … And ultimately, who do we do science for, and why?

This learning event is organized by the, and I am not making this up, "UC Santa Cruz’s Science and Justice Research Center", where, I suspect, there is not really anyone "doing" science. Well, perhaps metaphorically doing it in the Biblical sense.

For the life of me, I cannot wrap my mind around the fact that some parents would willingly, without a second thought, disadvantage their own children in some misbegotten effort to attain status among their fellows.

Vanity is a powerful drug and can skew one’s priorities, as can dogma, as can spite. Prioritising one’s own woke self-image above the wellbeing of others, even one’s own children, isn’t too much of a leap. And I suppose that once your sense of personal virtue - and superiority - depends on such posturing, it may be a hard habit to shake. It’s hard to back-pedal, and any challenge to the façade will be reacted against as a personal affront.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that a lot of the time it’s just in-group signalling – “ban private education!” - and unlikely to be enacted as national policy, so there’s little personal cost attached, and the middle-class lefties who position themselves in this way tend to have the means and contacts to compensate, at least to some extent, should they find themselves obliged to actually live their professed values. The children of Arabella Weir, for instance, are unlikely to face quite the same challenges as a bright prole child at a crappy comprehensive.

Trump: "You had people - and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists. They should be condemned totally. You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. The press has treated them absolutely unfairly."

I went back and reread all those old links. For the life of me, I cannot wrap my mind around the fact that some parents would willingly, without a second thought, disadvantage their own children in some misbegotten effort to attain status among their fellows. It's one thing to observe what occurs in inner city slums or the "hollers'" of deepest Appalachia and feel sympathy for people who don't know better. It's another to see people willingly kneecapping their own children for one of those "positional goods" we've discussed. One wonders where Dante would have stuck such parents in his Circles of Hell, if he were writing today.

Probably the Ninth (bottommost) Circle, which houses traitors. Specifically, its subdivision Caina, for treason against family.

(Dante's Ninth Circle also has separate areas for those who betrayed their principles, their guests, their lords, their country, etc. At the very centre are Cassius and Brutus for betraying Caesar, and Judas for betraying Jesus.)

“Karen Straughan has some thoughts on the Jordan Peterson / Cathy Newman interview.”

Within ten minutes of this video going up, Channel 4 had hit me with a copyright takedown. I filed a dispute based on fair use and it's now viewable again, but have lost my monetization privileges on this video for up to 30 days, the fuckers.

Saw this over at Ace. Can someone explain this sentence to me? As per yesterday's post I'm only about 23/20ths as smart as you people and obviously my language skilllllzzz are causing me problems:

"For men and couples considering the issue of cuckolding, it's important there be honesty, integrity, communication, mutuality and shared values," advised Ley. "I've seen men who try to trick their wives into cuckolding them, and this never, ever ends up well."

It would be interesting if we could calculate the cost of socialism to society just based solely on the opportunity costs of loss of productivity from people who have had to dedicate so much (all?) of their lives to refuting the stupidity of socialism for the last 200 years or so. Frédéric Bastiat must be spinning in his grave.